The 2025 Fitch Colloquium, titled Fragments of the Imagination: Provenance, Preservation, and the Afterlives of Architecture, brings together leading voices in preservation, architecture, art history, museum practice, and the humanities to examine the conceptual, ethical, and artistic stakes of working with architectural fragments.
Please register on Eventbrite
Organized by Columbia GSAPP Historic Preservation Program in collaboration with Provenance Projected—an international research collective exploring the social, material, and historical lives of buildings and their futures based at AHO—the colloquium asks:
How might architectural fragments be mobilized to reimagine the built environment—not as static inheritance, but as a site of imaginative transformation?
How can institutions such as museums, archives, and landmark commissions be rethought in light of the provenance and circulation of architectural fragments?
How does provenance shape disciplinary knowledge and epistemologies within architecture, preservation, art, and beyond?
This year’s colloquium is grounded in GSAPP’s experimental approach to preservation pedagogy and its teaching collection of historic architectural fragments housed in the Preservation Technology Laboratory.
The colloquium will conclude with a concert in Columbia’s St. Paul’s Chapel of choral music from sixteenth-century Iberia. Curated by music historians Susan Boynton and Eric Rice, the program explores the afterlives of medieval chant. The music will be performed by University of Connecticut’s Collegium Musicumunder the direction of Eric Rice, in collaboration with singers from the Department of Music at Columbia University.
The event concludes with a reception made possible by the generous support of the Royal Norwegian Consulate General.
Registration is required.
